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LTO-4 gains favor among tape drive buyers

Tape drive users have been busy since we surveyed readers about LTO-4 drives in December 2007. Adoption has increased 25 points, up to 35% in our most recent survey; and 42% say they have plans to deploy LTO-4 drives in the future. While LTO-4 usage has jumped from last year, LTO-3 is still the preferred drive of choice of those surveyed. Fifty-eight percent of respondents currently use LTO-3 drives vs. 63% last year. LTO-2 usage has increased a bit since last year, while LTO-1 has faded slightly. For those adopting LTO-4 drives, 43% say they're part of a new library, 41% are replacing older drives with LTO-4, and 16% are adding them to an existing library. LTO-4's native encryption hasn't found more takers since last year, with 34% saying they won't use that feature of the drive vs. 35% who didn't use it last year. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed are deploying LTO-4 for its 800GB capacity. --Christine Cignoli

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We asked storage vendors, industry analysts and technologists serving on storage industry associations about where they saw the SAN heading. There may not be sweeping architectural changes in five years, but there will be changes in the basic building blocks of the SAN infrastructure: networks and protocols; switches; storage arrays, disks and controllers; and SAN management.

According to Storage magazine's 2009 Storage Priorities survey, budgets earmarked for storage technologies will increase on average by only 3.8%. Tighter purse strings will affect most, if not all, companies, but mid-sized businesses may get hit a little harder than their smaller and larger cousins. But having less to spend doesn't mean storage managers will have less to do in 2009.

In our annual look ahead at hot storage technologies, we present our nominees for those storage technologies that are poised to break out of the pack and become essential building blocks for new products that make storage easier to manage, less costly and better performing.

A high level of mobility and the relative hardware independence of virtual servers greatly reduces the cost and complexity of putting disaster recovery (DR) in place, enabling companies to expand DR to a larger number of servers and applications.